


christmas cookies & almost kisses

by orphan_account



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, all of the christmas feels, gansey is terrible at baking cookies, i wrote this really quickly and i'm not completely happy with it but oh well, it's fluffy but also kind of sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-12
Updated: 2015-12-12
Packaged: 2018-05-06 09:04:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5410976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>or, gansey tries to bake cookies and nearly burns 300 fox way down</p>
            </blockquote>





	christmas cookies & almost kisses

**Author's Note:**

> I was feeling sentimental and missed baking cookies with my family for Christmas, so I ended up writing this. :3 This is my first time writing from Gansey's perspective, so I hope it turned out okay! Also, Bluesey almost-kisses are the cutest thing ever. <3

Gansey was sitting in his room, flipping through his journal and trying not to let his moodiness show. Not that there was anyone here to see him, but it felt somehow undignified to mope all by himself in his room on Christmas Eve. Not to mention horribly tragic.

 _Ugh._ It was useless. Gansey felt completely, utterly sorry for himself. It had all started when his sister had spontaneously decided to go on a Christmas vacation with her girlfriend. To _Reykjavik_. When Gansey had objected that there were only on average four hours of sunlight in Iceland during December, Helen had winked horribly and replied that “we need sunlight even less than we need clothes.”

Gansey would have thrown a pillow at her, if they weren’t having a phone conversation.

And then of course his parents were invited to Paris for some sort of congressional Christmas celebration, which was apparently a thing. Gansey supposed it was unfair considering the years he had spent away from home as a teenager, but it was hard not to feel slightly abandoned.

Adam and Ronan had thought that he would be at his parents’, so they were somewhere in Cabeswater, doing something that was supposed to strengthen the ley lines. They had offered to stay when they heard about the change of plans, but Gansey had brushed them off. Cabeswater was more important, and Ronan was calmer when he was outside, anyway.

Or maybe Ronan was calmer when he was around Adam. He wasn’t sure. Gansey twirled uselessly around in his swivelly leather office chair, wishing that Noah was there. He had been appearing less and less often these days - when Blue had gently pressed him for an explanation, he had muttered something about his family and then curled inward, clearly unwilling to say more.

And so there he was, sitting alone in his room on Christmas Eve. As much as he hated to admit it to himself, this seemed to prove the old doubts that Gansey had always had about his friends, that eventually they would all drift away and leave him, the neurotic and rarified and useless thing that he was.

He leaned forward and thumped his head on the desk with a groan. _You’re catastrophizing,_ he told himself. _No one is abandoning you. They’re just busy, doing better, more important things than spending time with you._

And now he was back in exactly the same place as before. He let out a heavy sigh, and then reached for a Latin text on Glendower, reasoning that if he was going to spend the foreseeable future in a spiral of self-loathing, he might as well badly translate ancient historical texts while he was at it.

Before he could open the heavy book, though, his phone rang. Presumably it was a classmate who wanted to invite him to one of those godawful Aglionby Christmas celebrations featuring copious amounts of alcohol and girls wearing very little besides Santa hats and small golden bells.

He was half-determined to ignore it, but a moment later he decided that anything was better than what he was doing right now. He flicked his thumb across the screen to accept the call, which was from an unknown caller, and then pressed the phone against his ear.

He leaned back, almost unconsciously reverting back to his polished, Richard-Campbell-Gansey-the-Third self. “Gansey,” he said, every syllable dripping with the casual power of old Virginia money. “Who is this?”

“I’m starting to have second thoughts about this,” was the first thing that Blue said. Her voice was familiar and deeply annoyed and suddenly the tight knot in Gansey’s chest unraveled completely.

He heard the faint sound of - was it Maura? - yelling something in the distance. “FINE,” Blue shouted back, slightly muffled as though she had held her hand over the phone, and then her voice was back. “Listen, we’re baking Christmas cookies, and you can come if you want.”

For a moment Gansey’s mind went completely blank. “Baking?”

“Yes, Gansey, _baking_ ,” Blue snapped. “It’s a thing that some people do. You know, when they don’t have French chiefs that used to work for Michelin starred restaurants.”

The Gansey family’s chief was actually Dutch, but Gansey thought it wiser not to bring this up. “I know what baking is, Jane. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Okay,” Blue said, and this time her voice was slightly warmer. Neither of them said anything for a minute, and something about it reminded Gansey of that night when Blue had called him late at night, when they had ended up pressed against each other and both aching for something they could never have. To Gansey’s horror, a faint blush rose up on his face.

 _“Gansey,”_ Blue said, and he was suddenly very thankful that he was alone, because he was fairly sure his complexion was starting to resemble the bright red polo shirt that he was wearing. “Stop breathing at me and hang up.”

“Right!” Gansey said, his voice slightly rough for no reason at all. “I’ll - yes - goodbye!” He hung up immediately, and then dropped his head onto his desk rather harder than he’d meant to, causing a dull bloom of pain and making him let out a strangled groan.

He’d hoped that there would be some sort of greater significance to his eventual second death, but no. He was just going to die of sheer embarrassment. They could engrave it on his tombstone. _Here lies Richard Campbell Gansey III, beloved son and brother, taken from us by the embarrassment of his total inadequacy compared to the glorious and fearless creature that is Blue Sargent._

A moment later he was standing up and grabbing the keys to the Pig from where they were lying on his desk. He pulled on a coat and then strode out of Monmouth, heading towards the low, bright orange car that felt like a part of his soul.

He slid behind the wheel of the Pig, pushing away any thoughts of death. For now, he was going to bake Christmas cookies.

☆☆☆

As it turned out, baking Christmas cookies was harder than he’d thought it would be.

“Oh my God,” Blue said, her voice breathless from giggling. Gansey, who was currently trying to maneuver sticky chocolate-colored dough off his fingers and onto the tray in a vaguely cookie-shaped form, had decided that he liked this version of her voice very much. He wondered vaguely how he could manage to hear it again. “You’re - this is - _how_.”

“Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain,” Calla said, which might have sounded more impressive if she wasn’t giggling over a half-empty glass of champagne. “‘Tis a holy night.”

Maura was teary-eyed with laughter, but she was still managing to arrange the dough into tidy, reindeer- and snowman-shaped configurations on her tray. Gansey gave her a disbelieving look. His tray was starting to resemble something akin to a crime scene, and he was only trying to make circles.

Blue stopped giggling long enough to pull the dough gently away from Gansey’s hands. “Here,” she said, neatly rolling the dough into a small ball and then pressing it onto the tray, so that it was slightly flattened. “It works better if you put some flour on your hands first.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that at the beginning, then?” Gansey objected, although he was grinning as well.

“Because you’re _seventeen_ ,” Blue said, her voice light and bubbling with mirth. “I knew how to do this by the time I was, like, five.”

Gansey might have been annoyed if he wasn’t too busy staring at the bit of dark hair that had escaped from her messy ponytail and was brushing against the apple of her cheek. He wanted to tuck it back behind her ear, and then kiss the place it had been resting.

He looked away quickly, turning to the sink to wash the dough off his hands. He laughed, trying to make it sound easy and effortless, as if his heart wasn’t currently stuck somewhere in his throat. “I don’t even know what I was doing when I was five. Probably trying to find Santa Claus.”

Blue made a strangled sound that sounded like something between a snort and a laugh. “Did you ever find him?”

“Yes,” Gansey said, smiling. “Eventually I caught him sneaking into my room in a red hoodie and a pretend beard, to give me my Christmas stocking. I kept trying to convince him to take me to the North Pole until he laughed, and I realized he was actually Helen.” Gansey shook his head, drying his hands off on the kitchen towel. “She still hasn’t let me live that down.”

Blue smiled softly at him. “That’s sweet.” Something in Gansey’s chest tightened; he’d almost forgotten about that story until now.

“Helen?” Orla said, wandering into the kitchen with a few small children trailing behind her. Gansey had already lost track of the number of people who had wandered in and out of the kitchen that night; it seemed as if 300 Fox Way was filled with an unending number of psychics, all of them female and most of them slightly tipsy. “Who’s that?”

“Gansey’s older sister,” Blue replied. Orla immediately glanced at Gansey, her expression speculative. “Who is in vacation in Reykjavik, with her girlfriend. Gansey, can you turn the oven on, please? I forgot.”

Orla pouted slightly. “Wait, Reykjavik? Don’t they only have four or five hours of sunlight a day in December?”

Gansey was impressed. “Apparently their plans don’t require sunlight,” he said, bending down to examine the oven. It was rather old and didn’t bear any resemblance to the sleek, modern monoliths that lived at the Gansey family residence, and they microwaved everything at Monmouth. He turned a dial to something that seemed to indicate heat, and then spinned another one to a random number that he thought seemed fairly reasonable for baking cookies.

“Too much information!” Blue said crossly. She finished the tray of cookies and then moved towards the oven, edging her way around the crowd of small children who had followed Orla into the kitchen.

Orla, on the other hand, was smiling wickedly in a way that reminded Gansey forcefully of Calla’s plum smirk. “Gansey, if your sister ever breaks up with her girlfriend, tell her to call -”

She was cut off by Blue’s sudden shriek. “ARE YOU TRYING TO BURN THE HOUSE DOWN, GANSEY?”

Gansey stared at Blue, his expression baffled. “What? Of course not!”

“THEN _WHY_ DID YOU SET THE OVEN AT FIVE HUNDRED DEGREES?”

Everyone in the kitchen burst into laughter, except for Gansey, who was blinking at her in confusion. “Is that… too hot?”

“Very slightly,” Orla choked out through peals of laughter. “It might be a degree off. Or two, possibly.”

For a moment Gansey was slightly worried that Blue was going to throw the tray of cookies at him, but then she took a deep breath and set it down on the counter. “Come on,” she said, dragging him out of the kitchen by his elbow. “We’re leaving before you actually do set the house on fire.”

☆☆☆

Outside, it was cold and quiet after the crowded warmth of the kitchen. Blue stomped forward and then settled on the steps of the porch, bending forward slightly and huffing warm breath over her hands.

Gansey smiled softly before moving forward to settle next to her. “I’m sorry,” he said, bumping her side gently with his elbow. “I really wasn’t trying to burn your house down.”

“I know you weren’t,” Blue said, rolling her eyes. “I didn’t come out here to yell at you, anyway.”

“No?” Gansey said in a hopeful voice. Blue choked out a laugh, and then sighed, scooting to the side so that she could lean her head against Gansey’s shoulder.

“No,” she said. “Look at the stars.”

It was a long moment before Gansey could drag his eyes away from the soft smile on Blue’s face, her eyes wide and filled with wonder in a way that he had rarely seen before. And then he looked up at the sky, vast and neverending and filled with thousands of stars, and he understood.

It was beautiful.

“I used to come out here every night,” Blue said, and even though he was staring at the universe spread out above them, he could still hear the smile in her voice. “One time my mom almost called the cops because I was hidden behind the bushes and she thought I’d gotten lost.”

“How old were you?” Gansey asked, looking back at her. He threaded his fingers in her hair and paused for a moment, until she nodded slightly, and then started gently combing through the untidy black strands.

“Five.”

“Oh, so about the same time you became a professional baker,” Gansey said, smiling when she laughed. The laugh quieted down, until it became a sigh, and she bit her lip.

“Gansey,” she said, so quietly it hurt. “We can’t do this.”

“I know,” Gansey said. But he didn’t move, and she didn’t either.

Gansey wanted to say _thank you_. He wanted to say _I love you_ and _next year you can visit my family_ and _let’s fly to Reykjavik_ and _I’m sorry I’m so bad at baking Christmas cookies_ and he wanted to kiss her.

He moved a breath closer to her. She looked up at him, and her eyes were wide and dark and filled with stars, and he wanted to kiss her for forever, he wanted to kiss her until he’d lost himself, he wanted more than he could ever possibly have.

He leaned down and pressed his forehead against hers, breathing out a shaky sigh against her lips. And it wasn’t a kiss, but it was her skin warm against his and their noses almost touching, and it was enough.

“It’s after midnight,” Blue said. “So it’s the twenty-fifth.”

Gansey gave her a wobbly smile. “Merry Christmas, Jane.”

“Merry Christmas, Gansey,” Blue said, smiling back at him.

**Author's Note:**

> Just so you know, the cookies were supposed to be baked at 350 degrees F. :3 Happy holidays!


End file.
